Pretend you have a few thousand lines of Javascript that leverages Ext. It works great in some browsers but in other browsers it just doesn’t work. Nada. It fails silently. And the completely useless choad these vendors pass off as a Javascript debugger gives you zero feedback. Imagine that, despite going bald, you managed to find the few remaining hairs attached to your head, pull them out and set them on fire.

Now pretend that changing all of your spaces to tabs fixes the problem.

You can stop pretending, because that’s what the solution was after last three days of debugging WebKit-powered Safari 3.2.1 and Chrome 1.0.

No, not a bug. Not a typo. Not a missing semi-colon. No, too many spaces. Because you know, they are in short supply!

I can’t tell you why. All I can tell you is I hate WebKit and especially Safari.

Now if you do the happy dance every time Steve Jobs blows his nose and you have a slightly masochistic side to you, you are welcome to explore the diff between the files that work in FF/IE7 but not Safari/Chrome and the one that works in all four.

To be clear, the single operation I performed between these two versions was a regular expression in Eclipse to change “[ ]{4}” into a tab character. Nothing more, nothing less.

In the mean time, I’m looking for my sanity. If you find it, please let me know in the comments.

5 Comments

Damn… That hurts… I don’t even know how you would begin to think that converting the spaces to tabs would have any effect, let alone find that it was the solution I think you’ve earned a long weekend – take Friday off!

brian said:

@Rik – thanks for dropping in – I just solved this about an hour ago and when my blood pressure returns to normal, I do plan to file a bug report. I try to be a good netizen so despite my Hulk-like flash of anger (some of which is unfairly directed at Webkit), I will happily contribute to debugging and getting it fixed.